Love: An Analysis Part II: The Evolutionary and Psychological Stance

Last time, on the Science Liaisons:

Intrigue! Drama! Humor! Sex! Drugs (Mentioned)! Hormones! Hot Girls! In his discussion on the biological processes behind love, Craig? delved deep into the brain and its related hormones to find out just what exactly causes those feelings we call "love" and "emotions". There he found oxytocin, dopamine, vasopressin and other amphetamines. As he shifts his focus to the evolutionary advantages and psychological reasoning behind love will he learn anything about himself? Will he open a door that can never be closed? Will you, his loyal reader, buy him a chicken finger sub for all of the hard work he puts into entertaining and informing you? All of these questions have answers, and to find them all you have to do is keep reading...

Being a dork for the majority of my life, I've had my fair share of ups and downs. I've seen success in love, but mostly failure. I've rebelled against my best instincts, swearing myself to a life as a bachelor. I've embraced my basest needs and chased multiple partners. I've overcome those same needs and dedicated myself to monogamy. I've analyzed what I want in a partner, and I've analyzed why someone would or wouldn't want me. In conclusion, I've spent a lot of time thinking about what love means, where it comes from, and how it affects us. This is obviously because of how lonely I actually am.

I had just sat down...

The Evolutionary Advantages of Monogamous Love

If there is one indisputable truth about the world we live in it's this: People are awesome creatures. It's not because God made us that way, because God didn't seem to give us any advantages over most types of other animals. If anything, He stacked the deck against us. What makes people so special, to me anyhow, is at how well we exploit the advantages we were given, such as opposable thumbs and the intellect to use tools. We've used this simple advantage to become the most adaptable creatures to ever walk the Earth, physically changing habitats to suit our needs. We've evolved so far we've overcome nature, to a point.

That being said, we're still weak creatures. If an average person were to physically go up against almost any other animal, insect, or plant in the wild, even with a weapon, they'd be dead within minutes. It's because of this weakness that we've evolved to love.

In David Funder's The Personality Puzzle he details how the English psychoanalyst John Bowlby theorized that love had it's origins in staking a claim on survival. Whenever we feel alone or are sick and/or injured we have an almost unexplainable innate desire to have someone who loves us by our side. Mr. Bowlby believes this is for protection; We want someone who is invested in us to help protect us and increase our chances of survival.

Children are in an even worse position. The worst kept secret in the history of the universe is that children suck, mostly because they smell bad and they're selfish. Here's another reason children are a plague to humanity: They're useless and take up valuable resources. So why bother taking care of them? The reason for maternal and (sometimes - definitely not in my case though...) paternal love is so the child can survive and continue the species. Steven Johnson wrote the following quote summing up what I just said in the article Addicted to Love from Discover Magazine: "The biological capacity for love is one way the brain prepares us for offspring who are born young and helpless and need tending to have the slightest hope of survival." For homo sapiens, any hope of survival depends on relying on others. Following this logic, the best way to know you can rely on someone is to be sure they love you. Which is exactly why women can never rely on me.

Whoops, I broke your heart again.

It's unclear what sort of evolutionary processes resulted in the necessity for people to love, but according to Helen Fisher there are "three basically different brain systems that evolved for mating and reproduction". First, there is the sex drive, or lust. This helps us find a partner; Why we choose who we choose is a psychological thing (maybe). When we initially find someone we're physically attracted to hormones are released and we've already narrowed down the field from 3.4 billion to one. The second brain system is romantic love, or focus. This is what old timey people from the middle ages may have called "courting". It conserves mating energy by allowing one to focus on an individual in order to decide whether or not it would be good to get all up in their genes (see what I did there?). The final brain system is the attachment phase. Helen Fisher describes it as "tolerating (your mate) long enough to raise a child".

Between this stage and the romantic love phase is usually when people find themselves becoming possessive of their mate - another evolutionary advantage. There are several evolutionary advantages to this, such as that whole protection and caring for thing I talked about earlier. However, before DNA testing became such a popular way of figuring out who your parents were, this possessiveness was also one of the only ways for men to know the child was theirs and they had successfully passed on their genes.

While I was finishing one of my many years of college (because I'm so smart) I took a personality psychology course. One day our professor (her name escapes me, so I'll call her Professor Womanface) took an impromptu survey of the class. The sampling size was probably around 200. Professor Womanface asked how many people would rather their mate be monogamous over successful. Mostly men raised their hands. She then asked the inverse of the question and mostly women raised their hands. She explained that these gender-dominated answers are because women prefer their men to be able to provide for them and their child since there can be no doubt that the child is theirs - the thing does pass through their vagina-hole after all. Men, on the other hand, have no such security in knowing the child is theirs, so it's much more important that their mate be monogamous. Which is funny considering that according to women, most guys go for sluts anyway.

Especially Corporate Sluts

Speaking of personality, those differences that stand-up comedians like to talk about between men and women? Could be evolutionary differences. Check it: Women like to talk and men like to do things for a reason. When estrogen levels are up in women their verbal ability goes up. Estrogen levels go up during times such as childbirth and breastfeeding. Women talk to their child, it's an attachment thing. Men on the other hand have spent thousands of years sitting side by side in the bush with their friends, hunting or fighting or protecting or watching porn and playing ookie cookie. Men and women simply have different ideas of intimacy; Women's being talking and men's being doing things side by side. Miss Fisher said it best when she said, "... (men have spent) millions of years facing enemies (and) sitting side by side with friends".

The Psychological Reasons for Love

We've all wondered what was going through our partners heads at one point or another. The most true stereotype I've ever come across (outside of white people not being able to jump) is the "she has daddy issues" stereotype. People are affected by what's happened in their past, and that weighs heavily on their present, for better or worse. For example, when I was a child my family was brutally murdered in front of me in an alleyway outside of a theater. It scarred me quite badly psychologically leading to a fear of things with erratic flight patterns, an intense desire to practice martial arts while dressed as something with an erratic flight pattern, and an emotional distance one can only describe as erratic.

That's right... I AM MOTHMAN!

It's pretty well accepted among, well, everyone that a person's personality is outlined by their relationships. In attachment theory (originated with John Bowlby and expounded upon by Mary Ainsworth) different adult behaviors are assigned to things that happened in childhood. Sweet, more theories and lists to remember.

Anxious-Ambivalent attachment means that a person's caregivers growing up were inconsistent in their behaviors. They would reward only some of the time, and discipline only some of the time. Perhaps the caregiver also contradicted themselves in their discipline and reward patterns, sometimes rewarding for one behavior and later disciplining for the same behavior. This can lead to a clingyness that is on par with the gravitational pull of the sun. So perhaps the "daddy issues" in all women's cases stems from this inconsistency.

There is also the avoidant/distant caregiver. This person's caregiver didn't give them enough attention so, being used to that form of independence, this person is now distant themselves. Most men will tell you that they had an avoidant/distant caregiver when they don't want to talk about their feelings. The flip side to this is a general social retardation: anxieties and a complete lack of understanding of others emotions may abound.

The final type of caregiver is the secure caregiver. Generally, this caregiver gave our hypothetical person a good home life, and they've grown up to be respectful, well-adjusted, independent individuals. I've never met anyone in my life that had a secure caregiver, especially any women.

It is interesting to note, however, that in attachment theory there isn't much mentioned about spoiling one's child. This is assumed to be OK and does not lead to such things as inflated ego, trouble identifying with peers, a disproportionate value placed on material things, and a general annoyingness.

I hate him.

This brings us to ORT, or Object Relations Theory. Melanie Klein outlines four principal themes in ORT:

1.) Pleasure/Pain Relationship

2.) Love/Hate Relationship

3.) Distinguishing between "love object" and whole person

4.) Awareness and Disturbance by Contradictory Feelings

The basic principal behind this theory is the idealization of the people around you. Most adults do it still, like when you first meet that hottt grl at the bar and think she's totally cool and smart and you love her only to find out she's actually kind of a bitch and your friends hate her but you keep telling them what a good person she is anyway even though she's clearly not and no this isn't from personal experience stay out of my business you jerk.

As bad as adults can be with things of that sort, children are worse because they lack what us scientists like to call "common sense". There is also the fact that adults tend to hide more things from children (especially their own) than from one another, usually in an effort to protect some sort of innocence which they know will just be brutally ravaged somewhere down the line anyway. Regardless, this theory leads us to a thing called neurotic defense, which is the contradiction of idealizing what you want to destroy. Nobody can live up to an ideal, except me because I am one, and this leads to hard feelings sometimes.

Often, at least according to D.W. Winnicott, children will put the feelings they have for their "love object" into something inanimate - like a stuffed animal. This comforts the child through the loss of their "love object", whether it be on a literal level like death or a more subtle, emotional and psychological level like realizing their parents are actually meth dealers. Silly parents!

In conclusion, love is a battlefield. Or something like that.

And that concludes Craig?'s two part series on love. There was laughter, tears, epiphanies, and several other things not appropriate for your age level, dear reader. If you've taken anything from this opus of a masterwork, we hope it's been that you're bound by love regardless of whether or not you wish to be. Biologically and psychologically we are destined to need love in our lives. Even evolution got all up in this bitch. And that never happens!